Wednesday, November 13, 2013

On Being Broken

I’ve been
broken.For a while now.

It didn’t
happen all at once.It happened slowly
like the changing of the leaves in the Fall from green to yellow to orange to
gone.If you pay close enough attention,
you can see the slight changes, but mostly you just look one day and notice
they’ve changed, and then you look again and they’re gone.

That’s what
happened to me.One day I was Me, and
then when I looked again, I was a little less Me.Not wanting to inspect the situation too
closely for fear of what I might find, I carried on with the Not Looking until
one day there was no escaping the absence of Me.

If you don’t
live near me, or if you don’t know me well enough to see it, you may not even
have known.Maybe you thought my leaves
were always an orangy-yellow, or maybe you were mistaken about my having had leaves
at all.But the truth is my leaves were
once full and bright and green.

Until they
started dying.

I don’t know
how it started.Our bodies are
mysterious things.People talk about
physical pain and emotional distress and mental illness as if there are many
separate parts of a person, but the truth is I have only one body, and all the
parts of it make up just one Me.

There has
been physical pain in the last few years.A lot of different kinds and for a lot of different reasons.They say that chronic pain can lead to
depression, but it’s hard for me to trace the exact path that took me from, “The
scar tissue on my kidney won’t stop flaring up” or “My painful digestive
disorder is incapacitating me” to “I want to hide under my covers for the rest
of my life.”Yet that’s where I ended
up.

The thing
about being broken is we always want to hide it.When my leaves were bright and green, I didn’t
mind showing them to the world.I loved
being a part of the world.I
participated in it fully, welcomed it, welcomed you.But when I began to break, I began to
hide.It’s exhausting to try to make
those ugly brown dying leaves look green, and let’s face it, who wants to look
at brown leaves?It’s easier just to
tuck them away so no one can see.But it’s
in the tucking that the disappearing begins.

At some
point I begin to notice that I was spending too much time in my bed.Too much time in the cozy cocoon of cotton
and down.But I liked it there.When I was in that safe place of my own
making, I could drown out the Voice.The
one that said, “You’re failing everyone.”Because if I let myself listen, that Voice had a lot to say.

“You’re not a
good mom.What a lousy example your setting
for your children.”

“You’re not
working hard enough at your job.”

“You’re
failing your husband.”

"You're not praying or reading your Bible. What kind of Christian are you?"

“Your house
is falling apart.”

“You’re failing
at everything.”

And that’s
not the half of it.I bet you know the Voice.Maybe it hasn’t broken you, but I bet you’ve
heard it whispering nonetheless.It’s
never content to limit its quiver of arrows to the present either.As if being a failure right now isn’t bad
enough, The Voice likes to fashion arrows from the mistakes and the pain of
yesterday and to sharpen their points on fears of tomorrow.

So for quite
some time now, I’ve been trying to hide from the Voice. I’ve hidden in my bed.I’ve hidden in my house.I’ve hidden from my family and my friends and
from the world because surely if I could hear it, you could hear it, too.So, instead of trying to make my leaves look
all pretty and green and alive, I just let them fall off altogether.

There was a
day when I noticed my leaves were gone.Noticed
I was broken.That was about a year
ago.But it was just too hard to try to
put them back.To grow leaves again is
not easy.To fix the brokenness requires
so much doing.So I stayed broken.

Until
recently.A few months ago I decided
that maybe it wasn’t all or nothing.The
idea of trying to put back all my leaves – all my pieces – was just too
daunting.But what if I could find just
one?Just one piece of Me that might
still be there?One green leaf?

So, I made
plans.I don’t mean A Plan.Not a plan to fix me, but plans with someone
to do something.Because the old Me did
things.Lots of things.The broken me did nothing.Just do something, I thought.

And I did.

And it didn’t
kill me.So I did another thing.

I’ve been
gradually doing more of the Things until I’ve recently begun to remember what
my leaves used to look like.They’re not
all back, but the hope of them is.And
that’s almost enough.

I’ve been
hesitant to share this because people – not unlike myself – can be so
judgmental about depression and brokenness.But, I decided I didn’t care.One
of my favorite leaves on the old Me was the writer leaf.It’s been dead for a long time, but maybe
this is what I need to write about to bring that leaf back to life.

Besides, I suspect we’re all a little broken
anyway.If your broken doesn’t strip you
bare and leave you hopeless, then praise God and pray for the rest of us.If it does, then know you’re not alone, and
maybe if all of us with no leaves stopped hiding from each other, the broken
wouldn’t hurt quite so bad.Because the
comfort we get from hiding in bed in our pajamas or from eating food or not
eating food or from self-medicating is that it drowns out The Voice.But, if we could all speak loudly enough to
each other from our brokenness, maybe we could do that, too.

2 comments:

Beautiful. I love your writing and your message has soo much truth! I am broken too and struggle with similar things. I will be praying for you. Love you! You are precious, and a daughter of the King.Ellen

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble."-Helen Keller

About Beck

I'm a lawyer who recently returned to work (part-time) after staying at home with my kids for the past five and a half years. I am married to an awesome, hardworking man who also happens to be a lawyer. Fortunately, we rarely argue. However, we also have three little litigators in training, and they do argue on a regular basis.

Our oldest is Joshua. He is seven, is an excellent artist and athlete, and wants to be a paleontologist and a rock star when he grows up. Also, he wants to discover a treasure like the guy in National Treasure. Don't we all? Next is Ethan who's five. He is a perfectionist who loves puzzles, games, playing soccer, and giving his mom hugs. He says he wants to be a baseball player when he grows up, though he has never actually played baseball as of yet. Last we have Lauren who is four. She loves to talk and sing and talk and play with her dolls and talk. She plans to be a ballerina or a driver when she grows up, which she says will be when she's 100. For the record, she has never driven.